


pink in the night

by andchaos



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Coming Out, Gen, M/M, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 11:08:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19440220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchaos/pseuds/andchaos
Summary: “I’ve been thinking,” Dennis tries again. “I’ve been thinking and I think…I need…I want to try…kissing a man.”





	pink in the night

“Stop reading Bible passages to me.”

“I’m trying to _help_ , dude.”

“How is blabbering a bunch of religious bullshit that makes no sense and that I don’t even believe in, supposed to help me?”

“Because, Dennis,” says Mac, sounding patient (as though Dennis is the one being irrational, _please_ ) as he scoots a little closer to him on the bed. Dennis closes his eyes again and tips his chin up toward the ceiling. He’s okay. He is okay. Mac is still talking— “This is what I always used to read to myself when I was, y’know, confused about life and stuff and I didn’t know what to do.”

“Right…Okay, fine,” he says. Sometimes it’s much easier to brush Mac off than try to understand him. Besides, he’s pretty sure Mac did more jerking off than crying when he was using the Good Book as a source of ‘relief.’ “So then what’s the Jesus for?”

“Oh, this?” Mac picks up the little figurine he dumped on the bed with them, examining it. “This is to help me act out what I’m reading to make it more interesting for you.”

Dennis pinches the bridge of his nose. He hopes to stave off the inevitable headache for a little while longer.

“Jesus Christ,” he sighs.

“Okay, forget the biblicism,” says Mac. He pushes the book and the little Jesus off the edge of the mattress, ignoring when they clatter to the hardwood floor, then pulls himself closer. Only barely, but Dennis can feel the closing distance between them like Mac is moving across his own skin. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” Dennis asks, dully — though for the first time he turns his head to the side and looks at him, head on. Mac blinks steadily back.

It’s too much, seeing him directly, and laying so close. Dennis’s throat closes over and he turns back to look at the ceiling. The ceiling is blank, and safe.

“Well, you’ve kinda been distant all week, buddy,” Mac says quietly.

If they’re being honest, Dennis has been distant for a lot longer than that: If he’s being honest, Dennis has been distant for too long, bordering on the offensive. He’s beginning to forget what it’s like to be anything else.

He used to think that was a good thing.

Dennis’s throat works again, aching but he doesn’t know with what. He feels Mac shift — just his knees curling up, getting comfortable, but the sudden lack of space between their thighs makes Dennis feel itchy-hot all over. Trapped.

“Then you skip all your shifts the past few days,” Mac goes on, but he doesn’t sound frustrated like Dennis expected, which calms his instinct to go on the defensive. “And when I finally come home, you’re laying in my bed. What gives?”

Dennis casts around for an answer to that. Not a lie, necessarily, although if he has one handy somewhere in his subconscious, he’d love to whip it out now; spit lies and roll out of Mac’s bed and escape before it’s too late. If he can’t come up with a good excuse, then he’ll have to tell the truth. The trouble is, he doesn’t know what that might sound like either. He doesn’t really know why he’s here.

If he’s being honest one more time — and again, only hushed and brief in the back of his mind, where he doesn’t have to look at it too directly in the light and be blinded like he was when he turned to see Mac more clearly — he hasn’t felt right in a very long time. There is something curling around his heart that’s been growing like a murderous vine since before he can remember, determined to squeeze everything out of him until he’s nothing left but skin and bone. He just didn’t think wasting away would take so long.

This isn’t the first time he’s looked at the vine, either. Age 18, for just a second before he pushed it back down. Age 22, moving in with Mac. Again at 31. A bunch more times after that, popping up like a short-lived firecracker, and always faded away before he can so much as do a double-take, but still a burning imprint in the dark when he stares in the space it used to be. If he had known the vine would take this long to choke him out, he might not have ignored it quite so hard, or at the very least he would have taken more precautions than he did to go under painlessly.

But he hadn’t known. How could he have?

Dennis turns to look at Mac again. When he opens his mouth at first, intending to speak, he finds the knot in his throat hasn’t come all the way undone yet; he mouths uselessly for a few seconds, trying to spit it out. Feeling it slide its way back down instead.

It’s much easier to whisper around the knot than try to untangle it completely, though.

“Lately I’ve been thinking…”

Mac’s brow furrows. He ducks closer, trying to hear.

“What?”

Dennis takes a shuddering breath in. God, why does his skin feel so hot? Like he’s burst abruptly into a fever. His hand is even shaking when he begins to reach out — for what, he doesn’t know. He isn’t really thinking at all. He loses his nerve (or comes back to his senses?) halfway through and splays his hand out on the bed between them instead. Mac looks between it and Dennis’s face with his lips parted.

Dennis’s tongue darts out, swiping across his own. His mouth feels so fucking dry.

“I’ve been thinking,” he tries again, because what else are you supposed to do when you’ve been standing at the place where the beach becomes the ocean for four goddamn decades? A swelling ocean, where the waves get bigger and meaner every year that it pushes against your back, until there’s no breaks between each one and you’re bruised all over your spine just from trying to hold yourself up? Eventually you fall over. Eventually you eat sand or get swept away underwater. “I’ve been thinking and I think…I need…I want to try…kissing a man.”

Even though they’ve been doing nothing but breathing and sort of holding a conversation, the room feels suddenly plunged into a new, horrible silence. A weight caves in Dennis’s chest, making it difficult to breathe again. He squeezes his eyes shut to avoid looking at Mac’s open mouth and raised eyebrows any longer. He is an idiot. He is an idiot. He should leave.

Before he can move, he feels a tentative touch to the hand lying between them pulling at the sheets. It brushes across his knuckles, barely there.

“Really?” Mac asks.

He sounds impossibly small. Quiet, and Dennis can hear the hope he’s crushing beneath his heel with all the strength he can muster, and Dennis is so tired. He opens his eyes.

Mac looks just as he sounded: Broken open and wanting, that quiet yearning he could never mask splashed across his visage, so blatant that Dennis always wondered if he was even trying. But, he’s clearly trying now.

“Yeah,” Dennis breathes. He doesn’t know how to explain it; doesn’t know if he would have the muster to tell it to Mac, even if he did.

“Are you—?”

Dennis flinches.

“No,” he sighs. Mac’s feather-light fingers halt on his skin, and Dennis can feel that he’s about to pull back. To stop him, he turns his hand over. Mac’s mouth closes. Wordlessly, he begins to trace a nail across Dennis’s palm. Dennis trembles. “I’ve been thinking about it, man. Wondering. I, uh…” He laughs breathlessly, and he’s never been less amused by something in his entire life. “I need to know. I think I need to know. And I’ve been thinking about it, and trying to work it out in my head without, um, crossing that line, but I — can’t. I don’t think I can move past it. Not until I know for…sure.”

Mac isn’t looking directly at him. His gaze is stuck on his own fingers trailing across Dennis’s love and life lines, and Dennis thinks he’s glad that nobody’s eyes are on his face. He just looks at Mac and drinks him in, unfettered and unjudged.

“I know,” Mac says quietly.

His gaze flicks up to Dennis’s for a split second before he retrains his attention on their hands, seemingly mesmerized. Dennis turns pink, wondering what he glimpsed there. He can’t get a good grasp on his own expression, he can’t tell what Mac was seeing.

Mac’s touch feels good, he thinks dazedly. The pads of his fingers run in a semicircle around the base of Dennis’s palm. He strokes in soft lines up individual fingers. Dennis gets the urge to curl in on himself, or pull Mac closer — he can’t tell, and he doesn’t understand how those two opposing instincts can feel so confusingly alike. His blood is boiling hot, he gets the same tug behind his gut like he’s being tickled, he feels like the places Mac’s touching are glittering, or maybe burning, or maybe being painted in frostbite.

With more care than he can remember being shown in a very long time, Mac turns Dennis’s hand over. He leaves his own lightly trapped beneath it, save for his thumb — and, when it begins to run across Dennis’s knuckles in hypnotic and dizzying and terrifying strokes, Mac’s focus flicks up to Dennis’s face. Mac relaxes into a soft smile.

Dennis can’t breathe. The knot’s too thick, it’s swelled too much in his throat and he can’t get anything out around it. Not a whisper, not air. His hand tightens, unbidden, in Mac’s loose hold, but Mac doesn’t react. Just keeps gently rubbing the back of his hand and watching him.

An impossible tug in his stomach — one more wave hitting his back — he’s too tired to wait any more. Dennis ducks in, and Mac clutches at his hand for the first time, thumb stilling against his knuckles. Dennis pauses an inch apart from him. Mac can pull away if he wants to. Dennis doesn’t think he will, but he has the chance.

Seconds tick by. Mac doesn’t move. The knot in Dennis’s throat begins to unravel.

Dennis reaches his free hand up to cup the side of Mac’s face, leans in, and kisses him. It’s not hard, not needy. Just a gentle pressing of their mouths together, and it’s the most intense thing Dennis has ever felt in his life.

Mac doesn’t take over like he was expecting, and he’s glad. He just lays there, holding his hand tight.

Dennis kisses him for twenty seconds maybe, tops. Not really moving. Just holding him pulled against him, and he doesn’t know how Mac feels so relaxed beside him because he’s never been wound so tight, unless he was angry. He’s burning so hot he’s going to crack apart. He’s sure of it.

He ducks his head into the warm curve of Mac’s neck and curls his arm around him. When Dennis arches closer, Mac lets go of his hand so he can mold their bodies together, wrapping his arms around Dennis tight. One hand is stroking through his hair. On Dennis’s first exhale, he realizes that he’s shaking. On his second, he notices Mac hushing him quietly.

“It’s okay, Dennis,” he whispers, right by his ear. His fingers are relentless, caressing the back of his head, keeping him tucked into his shoulder and petting his hair like he might if someone were sobbing on him. “It’s okay, it doesn’t matter.”

Dennis chokes on a laugh. Doesn’t matter?

His hands clench in the back of Mac’s shirt. Mac keeps murmuring to him, and he doesn’t hear a word of it over the sound of the ocean in his ears.

Eventually his heartrate slows down nearly back to normal. Mac isn’t stroking his hair anymore but he’s still cradling his head, and he’s rubbing circles into Dennis’s spine. He doesn’t know when Mac stopped whispering to him but he’s glad that he did, before he had the chance to make sense of any of it.

The vine inside him is like this: deep green and ugly black, and it looks half-dead itself. It’s got tendrils wrapped around everything. In the very beginning, it only wound its way in endless circles around his heart, squeezing tight enough to spring a leak and happy to let that gush out at its own pace. Over time, it got bored of that and branched out, curling around everything it could find. Carving out a sharp pit in his stomach, where he threw anything he could think of inside like it was the sinkhole in the bathroom, just trying to glimpse the bottom so he would know where to start putting down foundations before filling it in, but he never could find the end. Squeezing its way down his arms, until his hands were always curled into fists. Winding its way into something deeper — he doesn’t know what it touched. Something he might call his soul if he thought they were real — and so he doesn’t recognize his own voice half the time, until he suddenly finds himself screaming and he doesn’t know why.

And nothing worked. He hacked at the vine with all the liquor he could find, with all the women he could get, with turning the bar successful and focusing on his work and throwing himself into scheme after scheme after goddamn stupid, awful, fruitless scheme. But nothing so much as made a dent. It was immune to fire, it was immune to everything. It just grew and took from him and grew, until nowadays when he sometimes thought that he felt more vine than Dennis.

But for the first time, lying in Mac’s bed, wrapped up with him, and feeling like after eight years he can maybe, finally stop missing him — he thinks he feels something shift. Not a chipping away of a vine, but something quieter: Maybe, he hears something clatter at the distant bottom of the sinkhole.

Dennis raises his face out of Mac’s neck. Mac’s hand pauses and tightens on his back, and he looks back with his lips parted.

“Wha—?”

Dennis lays his palm against Mac’s cheek, and his question dissolves in the scant air between them. His thumb sweeps beneath Mac’s eye, and suddenly he needs to touch more of him: Fingers dragging down his chin, touching his lower lip, pushing through the fringe on his forehead. Dennis curls his arm around his neck, threading his hand up through his hair. When Mac breathes, Dennis can feel it against his mouth.

“What are you doing to me, man?” he says. It comes out low, breathed through a half-laugh when he doesn’t want to say it at all. He doesn’t mean to. It just spills out of him.

Mac’s hands tighten on his lower back. Dennis’s breath hitches.

Mac sounds almost apologetic when he murmurs, “This is how it’s supposed to feel.”

Dennis swallows, the knot suddenly back in full force. They look at each other for so long that Dennis thinks he can feel it when the last of the oxygen in the room dissipates. With an exhale, he pulls Mac in with the hand in his hair and kisses him again, slower.

Mac is pliant under his touching. His hands run up Dennis’s back, big and soothing and grounding, but he doesn’t pull him any closer. He lets Dennis duck in and slot their lips together again, and again, and again and again — never going further, never pushing for more. Just willingly giving back what he gets.

Dennis curls himself closer, cradling Mac’s jaw. He ducks in and kisses him open-mouthed this time. When Mac responds in kind, one of his hands slides down and covers Dennis’s hip, grasping and steady. Dennis’s entire body shudders, but before the enormity of the touch really has time to sink in, Mac’s tongue is on his lower lip — gentle, and prodding. Hesitant.

Dennis lets him lick into his mouth and kiss him deeper. He wants to melt into him. He feels like he’s combusting. If they were standing, his knees would surely give out. Not because it’s the most skilled or the gentlest or the most loving kiss he’s ever had, but because it’s just — right. Everything in place. Skin sparking where they touch, butterflies in his stomach. He doesn’t know if it feels this way because of Mac specifically, or if what he said earlier was true: This is what kissing is supposed to feel like.

Can that be right? he thinks dizzily, as they get sweeter, lips melding with more intent and less tongue. Can it really feel like this even if you don’t know the other person? Even if you’ve just met them? As long as you’re attracted to them — as long as they’re a man?

Something lurches within him. He doesn’t think he gave anything away, but already Mac is barely kissing him at all. Already Mac’s pressing his lips to the corner of Dennis’s mouth. Already Dennis is ducking in for one last, soft kiss before they pull away.

They’re both breathing hard, but Dennis is sure that his heart is the only one that’s racing. He can’t make himself meet Mac’s eye; being seen by him at all suddenly feels like far too much of a trial, so he rolls over again so that he can look at the ceiling and pretend Mac’s gaze isn’t boring into his profile. Mac keeps rubbing his back until he can’t anymore, and then he props himself up on his elbow and looks at him. Dennis wants to snap at (beg, plead with) him to stop staring but he can’t muster up the energy. All the wind’s been knocked out of him. So he just looks at the ceiling.

Eventually, in his periphery, he sees Mac lay back down. He’s sure that Mac’s still facing him, but he doesn’t feel so much like he’s being studied anymore. At least he can finally begin to relax.

But even though he can feel his heart beating slow and steady, there’s something burning at the inside of his skin. Igniting him from the inside out.

How long can you stand at the place where the beach becomes the ocean? How long can you let the swollen waves push against your back, with no breaks in between, feeling yourself bruising with every pass but just trying to hold yourself up? How long can your numb feet stay planted there? How long can you stand it?

Easy: Until you can’t anymore. Until you collapse from exhaustion. Until it isn’t a question of willpower, but of your body being consumed entirely by raw _need_. A need to survive. A need to sleep.

Dennis breathes out slow, still blinking at the ceiling. His head feels a little cottony, and his hands feel warm. Every inch of him is unshakably, unnervingly calm.

“I’m gay,” Dennis says.

The first time he admits it aloud, he’s staring at the ceiling. Maybe later he’ll know who he’s talking to, but for now it’s either himself, or it’s Mac, or it’s nobody and he just had to let it out into the world. He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.

Dennis tenses against a possible reaction, but Mac doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything. Dennis glances over to see if he’s fallen asleep, his heart falling somewhat, but Mac’s still wide awake: Wide awake and staring at Dennis, motionless, silent. Dennis exhales, his body unwinding. He turns back to the ceiling.

He feels, after a very long time, Mac reach out and touch his arm. Dennis doesn’t move, doesn’t even look at him — but after a moment, Mac begins to aimlessly trace patterns into Dennis’s forearm and up past his elbow. Dennis sighs. He closes his eyes.

There’s still that horrible vine and its endless offshoots, wrapped one thousandfold around his heart and all throughout every blood vessel, and he doesn’t know how to hack away at it. Not really. But at the very bottom of the endless pit in his gut, there was a clatter in the dark earlier. He heard it when he and Mac kissed — when he let himself touch. And for the first time, he can see himself getting down to his knees to sketch out a blueprint of where to put the scaffolding in that horrible chasm. Eventually, he’ll climb down and pour in the foundation. Maybe he’ll sit on the edge, legs swinging, and watch it all stitch itself back whole.

But for now he lays down, side by side with the only person who’s ever known him. The one person he’s been missing all these years, but the only one he hopes will stick around yet. He closes his eyes, and Mac’s fingers are light on his arm. This is as good a place as anywhere to start.

**Author's Note:**

> this is rob's fault (he should be in jail for posting that picture), [rose's fault](https://lesbianfreyja.tumblr.com/post/185987936055), and [my fault](https://lesbianfreyja.tumblr.com/post/185981795770), and thank u to [gene](https://honeyreynolds.tumblr.com/) for the title ❤️


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